(iPoster) Public Support for Democracy and Subjective Resilience Capacity in Lithuania

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics; European Politics and Society; & International History and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: European Politics and Society

Abstract

Recently, democratic resilience has become an important topic of discussion in political and, especially, democratic studies. Analytical frameworks have been presented about how this phenomenon could be studied, which dimensions should be measured and so on. Importantly, Croissant and Lott (2024) have suggested that democratic resilience (and by extension resilience of any society or polity, more generally) could be measured along two broad dimensions: performance and capacity. The former could be employed to evaluate how resilient a system actually is, and the latter the ability of that system to remain or to become resilient. Both of these dimensions have three analytically different outcomes: continuation, resistance and bounce back of a system after a crisis or shock. In this paper we focus on the study of resilience capacity of a polity to resist and bounce back from crises and its subjective evaluative aspect – public perceptions of resilience capacity.
Our main research question asks whether public support for democracy is linked to public perceptions of resilience capacity of a polity (not just democratic resilience). To answer this question, we analyze data of a nationally representative survey collected in summer of 2024 in Lithuania, relatively young democracy, member of the EU and other international democratic organizations. We investigate how other factors (compared to impact of public support for democracy), such as, pride in country’s institutions (its economic, political, cultural etc. achievements), perceived features of society (polarization, populist leanings, resilience to fake news, trust in science etc.), individual political attitudes (ideology, populism etc.) and individual external political efficacy influence citizens’ views on resilience capacity of their polity. We employ descriptive and multivariate inferential statistical methods for this task.

Authors

• Vytautas Valentinavičius, Kaunas University of Technology (KTU)

• Unregistered Participant

• Egle Butkeviciene, Kaunas University of Technology